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November
09
2017

Get Politics And Religious Bigotry Out of The Law
Karl Denninger

We're supposed to be better than that, and maybe we finally are.....

For the first time, a majority of Republicans are in favor of legalizing marijuana, according to a Gallup poll out Wednesday.

Fifty-one percent of Republicans tell Gallup that, yes, marijuana should be legal, up from 42 percent last year.

That support has led to a whopping two-thirds of Americans (64 percent) supporting pot legalization, the highest ever recorded by Gallup. Gallup has data on the question since 1969.

Marijuana was made illegal in the United States on the back of a campaign financed and promoted by the Hearst paper empire, which was deeply concerned about the ability of hemp to displace wood pulp for paper production.  The Hearsts owned vast expanses of pulp wood forest along with newspapers and used the latter to protect the former by driving public opinion about marijuana -- thereby effectively outlawing hemp.

Then there was the raw xenophobic and intentional lies spun in movies like Reefer Madness, which made the claim that Mexicans like to smoke weed (possibly true) but after doing so inevitably became raving animals who would uncontrollably******white women.  It was therefore essential to prohibit marijuana, you see.

That is what actually happened folks.  It was an intentional lie then and still is today.

Laws are not supposed to be predicated on lies, and when they are and the lie is discovered the government has an obligation to scrap said law.  Yet for decades it has refused to do exactly that.

Today we have jackwads like Jeff Sessions who still want to run this sort of crap -- a morality-based play that essentially argues that a plant should be illegal to grow, possess and consume because he thinks its bad.  "Good people don't smoke pot", basically, is his argument, and while he's certainly entitled to his opinion enforcing that opinion by law is another matter entirely.

Leave the medicinal argument aside for a moment (which is quite strong as well, I remind you.)  After all I've been known to gargle with a shot of scotch when I have sore throat.  Whether that's "safe and effective" isn't really the point; what's on-point is that I have every right to put ethanol in my body should I so choose and the risks and benefits of doing so are mine.

In a land where we have an opiod epidemic (which, I remind you, is driven not by illegal drugs but by doctors pushing this crap on people who they know are at high risk of physical addiction) I can find no argument at all for maintaining marijuana, a drug that is not physically addictive, as an illegal substance when even some small percentage of those who might seek a pain script from a doctor would likely instead choose to toke up a joint.

Some 60,000 people a year die from opiod overdoses in this country today.  If even 5% of those people would have chosen to smoke a joint instead and thus never start down the road of opiod addiction we'd be +3,000 people a year andwe'd have the tax revenue from the doobies they bought and consumed.

Of course the medical and pharmaceutical industries hate this idea; they make a hell of a lot of money killing those 60,000 people a year, never mind all the side effects and medical treatment required due to same.  Anything that reduces the ability to push poisons on the public under the name of "medicine" you can bet both doctors and pharma will oppose.

I often wonder why it is that given both the medical profession's and pharmaceutical companies unbroken record in this regard, along with the pile of dead bodies from opioid addiction they have created the people in this nation at-large have not yet risen up with gallows and bonfires, laying in orders for enough BBQ sauce to make the outcome palatable.

Smoking anything is a bad idea for obvious reasons but I remind you that nobody has to smoke marijuana to consume it.  You can choose edibles or a vape pen that uses oil; said vapes are both nearly odorless and harmless to others, and of course so are edibles -- other than the risk of someone getting very stoned by accident if they eat your pan of brownies.  (One could even argue that outcome is deserved if they didn't ask if it was ok to have some first!)

Legalization is thus a double win.  It is long past time to remove marijuana from our federal drug laws, leaving us with a regulated and taxed system of distribution for those 21 and over who choose to consume it, just as we have today for alcohol.  To not do so immediately is a travesty that both destroys lives and empowers bigotry, including among people who ought to know better like Jeff Sessions and other members of our federal and state governments.

Mr. Denninger, recent author of the book Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, is the former CEO of MCSNet, a regional Chicago area networking and Internet company that operated from 1987 to 1998. MCSNet was proud to offer several "firsts" in the Internet Service space, including integral customer-specified spam filtering for all customers and the first virtual web server available to the general public. Mr. Denninger's other accomplishments include the design and construction of regional and national IP-based networks and development of electronic conferencing software reaching back to the 1980s.

He has been a full-time trader since 1998, author of The Market Ticker, a daily market commentary, and operator of TickerForum, an online trading community, both since 2007.

Mr. Denninger received the 2008 Reed Irvine Accuracy In Media Award for Grassroots Journalism for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown.

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